Backstage

Two Proposed Solutions to Snow Leopard Crash Problems on Macs

By Jeremy Horwitz ● Tuesday, October 6, 2009

After 155 comments from readers on the topic of Snow Leopard crashes, two potential solutions have been posted by readers. We’re posting them here (a) to help you find them more easily and (b) because we’d like to know whether either one fixes your problems.

Solution (a), from reader Darren:

“I have had no end of problems, especially with Safari, since upgrading to Snow Leopard and now ALL MY PROBLEMS HAVE BEEN SOLVED by a simple boot into safe mode then reboot. For those that don’t know how to do it, reboot your mac and hold down the shift key until it shows the apple symbol in the middle and a grey or black progress bar starts then release. When it boots up you should notice it says safe mode, test, Safari mainly in my case, or what ever and if it all works just reboot without holding the shift key, Job sorted. What I’m told you are doing is re-writing all the permissions from scratch, mine is like it used to be, fantastic and with Snow Leopard.”

“Anyone that’s getting crashes whenever the system tries to save or open docs should try this:

-1. Start by opening System Preferences
-2. Select ‘Sharing’ from the Internet & Wireless section
-3. From the list on the left choose ‘File Sharing’ and turn it off.
-4. Delete anything listed in the Shared Folders section
-5. Turn File Sharing back on
-6. Log out, then Log back in
-7. Done!!”

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Comments

1

Did either one fix your problems, Jeremy? So far I’ve held off on “upgrading” to Snow Leopard- in part because of your previous backstage post and all the responses to it.

Posted by Dyvim on October 6, 2009 at 1:53 PM (CDT)

2

Snow Leopard went off of my machines and won’t be going back on again until the issues are resolved. Hopefully the solutions above help some people, but as it’s Buyers’ Guide assembly month, I can’t risk having the sorts of Photoshop, Safari, iChat and other crashes I was dealing with before. There are too few hours in a day to be a beta tester for 10.6 on top of everything else I’m working on. :-)

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on October 6, 2009 at 4:07 PM (CDT)

3

... and that’s exactly why I’m sticking to 10.5 for now.

Posted by Dyvim on October 6, 2009 at 4:16 PM (CDT)

4

OH YEAH! Woohoo guys! Just stumbled on this page, read the two remedies, tried the Safe Boot, and it seems to have spanked this bad boy back into line. Too early to tell if it fixed everything, but it’s far better (and much easier) than anything else I’ve tried.

For the past three weeks I’ve been experiencing all of the common crashing problems—ever since installing SL. First I did an upgrade over 10.5.8 (MacBook Pro 2.88GHz), and it started into dumping on me immediately. Mainly the Adobe CS4 apps—all of them—seemingly randomly but often at a save or an export out to PDF. Lightroom and MS Office too, though much less often. Out of frustration I wiped everything and installed clean to a freshly formatted drive—a couple days’ work with all the crap I have to run. The crashing persisted—no better no worse, and I’ve been scratching my head ever since. Running some apps in Rosetta seemed to help, but who wants to do that?

Being a Mac optimist, I simply refuse to give up. I’ll take this short-term conundrum over an eternity of Vista “compromises” and inadequacies any day. See, once the fix is in, it will back to the good life, and you whiners who want to bail to Windows 7, or whatever, will be sucking wind yet again. Besides my workstation runs 10.5.8 still and it will stay that way until I’m satisfied SL is stable. My MacBook is the test lab. I feel for you kids that are hosed on one system. But hang in there, this actually looks promising.

The most reliably unstable piece for me has been Photoshop CS4’s Image Processor script, and that won’t even run in Rosetta mode. It would work correctly exactly once per boot-up. Then every subsequent time, it would dump as soon as I set a different source directory for images and closed the source dir dialog. Before I could hit “Run” it would dump me out—every time until I rebooted. Then it would work again, exactly once. Imagine the lost time in that workflow.

After I tried the Safe Boot, then restart (I figure it’s a simple enough fix if it works, right? ... what’s to lose?) Bingo! Immediately the Image Processor script runs perfectly! So far so good anyway. I just finished processing a series of sixteen 60-100 image directories in succession—changing source directories each time—with exactly zero dumps. Fingers crossed big time!

Cant thank you enough! I’m not a member, but I know you don’t do this for the fun of it. Where do I donate?

5

A short time after installing snow leopard upgrade
I had to do a force quit on a program and just shutdown my MacBook and can not get it to boot up again. Tried all the combinations that Apple manual suggested but it just won’t boot up. I am in Africa at the time and I didn’t bring my TechTool disc or OSx disc with me. Any suggestions???
Regards
Dave Vick

Posted by David Vick on October 7, 2009 at 7:27 AM (CDT)

6

I think this might have cracked it. I’ve been going crazy with constant crashes, I can’t say this is fixed yet as I’ve only just completed the “fix” but I have tried out Photoshop CS3 that used to crash very reliably and it now works as it used to, i.e. doesn’t crash.

Some background, I’ve got a new 17 inch MBP with SSD and 8GB Ram (yes it’s a wonderful machine). It worked perfectly and an application crash was at most a monthly event, perhaps even less. I upgraded to SL the day it came out but I bought it in France, I just happened to be in France when they announced the upgrade and I’m enough of a geek to be on holiday with my laptop. I thought the problems were related to the fact I’d used a French SL upgrade on English Leopard.

I’ve been running full 64 bit and thought that too might be the problem but it crashed in both 32 and 64 bit so I stuck with 64.

Photoshop CS3 became almost impossible to use and until I read here that CS4 was also crashing I was about to go out and pay the fortune for the upgrade. It crashed when saving files, a simple test was to open a JPG or EPS, do something simple like resize and then save as PNG, as soon as the last dialogue came up for the interlaced or not it crashed.

XCode crashed, Interface Builder crashed, Photoshop crashed, MS Excel crashed, it just reminded me of Windows except it was just the application that crashed not the whole machine.

So, I carefully read through all of the messages in the “Problems With Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Join The (Sizable?) Minority” post and then discovered this. I did both of the options above, in fact I did the second while in safe mode, rebooted and so far I can’t get it to crash.

If I remember I’ll come back in a few days and let you know how I get on.

Best of luck everyone,

-John-
Twitter: @jtdavies

Posted by John Davies on October 7, 2009 at 11:31 PM (CDT)

7

Halleluljah! Great sleuthing. After 3 weeks of total frustration, I tried botyh suggestions - great so far. Up til now, every time I make a pdf in InDesign it crashes; same in Powerpoint. Mail would quit unexpectedly especially when attaching or unattaching a doc to an email. So far so good there, too. And Safari would crash on trying to open a pdf document. (The pdfs seem to be an issue). NOTE: the Apple guy swore that zapping my P RAM would stop Safari and Mail problems; didn’t work - and made things al ittle worse in MAIL. On the other hand, maybe that is a third move that should be considered with your two.

Posted by Grant Wiggins on October 8, 2009 at 5:20 PM (CDT)

8

Thanks for the tip! After having sent about 100 crash reports in over the past few weeks, I tried both of the suggestions above, and seem to have much improved crash resistance under Aperture, Safari and Photoshop CS3 and CS4.

Posted by PhotoMatt on October 8, 2009 at 6:35 PM (CDT)

9

Sweet Jebus, it worked!!

Well, so far, so good, at any rate.

Thanks soooo much for posting this. I’ve been getting about a dozen crashes a day when opening/saving in a number of apps, which sadly is MUCH better then the 30-40 a day before 10.6.1.

Been about 2 hours, and not a single crash yet! And I’ve really tried.

Cheers,

Ira

Posted by Ira Salsberg on October 8, 2009 at 7:30 PM (CDT)

10

oh my crap, I tried the safe mode thing a while ago with no change, but that second one SEEMS TO HAVE FIXED IT!!!!!!!!

I tried saving about 30 images with safari and opera, which usually results in about 8 crashes, now zero crashes

thank you so much

Posted by pj on October 9, 2009 at 3:20 AM (CDT)

11

Follow-up to my earlier post. Got an email return from David Pogue at the NYT who said Fixing Permissions (Disk Utility) solves many problems. He also said 10.6.2 is due momentarily.
Another site has a long series on font problems.

Posted by Grant Wiggins on October 9, 2009 at 8:19 AM (CDT)

12

I just received my MacBook Pro a few days ago. I did the normal set-up with the AirPort settings so I could access the internet through my DSL connection at home, launched iTunes a few times, turned on home-sharing in iTunes and authorized my computer in iTunes.

I surfed around a few websites, and then decided I would launch the Logic Express app to play around a little.

It crashed, and crashed and crashed. I never did get the application to successfully launch. Needless to say, that’s a bit of a bummer. I’ve always had very good stability with Apple’s software. For a brand-new computer, with software that they installed (I ordered the MacBook Pro with Logic Express pre-installed), is really weird.

I love OS X, but Apple better get this one figured out pretty quick.

I will say, the computer did tell me there were updates ready do download, and I have not done that yet. It’s possible with the updates the problem will go away, but it sounds like you guys have been having the same thing happen.

I am going to download the updates from Apple, and see how that goes.

If things are still unstable, I’ll try the fixes above, one at a time and see which one works.

I am glad I found this page.

Posted by Justin Hackett on October 9, 2009 at 11:21 AM (CDT)

13

On my C2DD Intel iMac, I have upgraded TO Snow leopard FROM Leopard, which was upgraded FROM Tiger which was migrated from my old Quicksilver mac running Tiger, which was upgraded FROM Panther, and I have YET to have a problem with ANY of the upgrades.

I haven’t done anything special, so I guess I’m just downright LUCKY, eh?

Posted by ahMEmon on October 9, 2009 at 4:21 PM (CDT)

14

Hello,

Solution 2 worked like a charm. No crashes for a couple of days now. Prior to that it was crashing continuously, especially when saving attachments etc.

Thanks for posting the solution!

Hany

Posted by Hany Greiss on October 10, 2009 at 10:30 AM (CDT)

15

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! This problem had been driving me so crazy, I was ready to return to Leopard without snow! I did both suggestions simultaneously (so I don’t know which one did the trick) and I have not had a problem all day!!! (I formerly would crash Photoshop, Safari, Pages, Entourage within minutes of starting.)
It is so wonderful to be able to google a problem and find a community such as yours with the answer!

Posted by Rick Forschner on October 10, 2009 at 6:16 PM (CDT)

16

IT WORKED!!! THANK YOU!!

Posted by Rob on October 11, 2009 at 2:36 PM (CDT)

17

p.s. I used solution B.

Posted by Rob on October 11, 2009 at 2:38 PM (CDT)

18

B worked for me- thanks guys

Posted by Tom on October 12, 2009 at 3:40 AM (CDT)

19

Solution B worked for me as well. I had invoked A and B without thoroughly testing the impact of each. Then after two days of stable, crash-free operations, I became emboldened enough to reinstall Illustrator CS3, which had become so volatile in Snow Leopard to render the application unusable.

Following the reinstall, Illustrator promptly and regularly crashed. This time I tried Solution A. No dice. Then B. Dice!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Posted by Tom Fuldner, LLC on October 13, 2009 at 9:34 AM (CDT)

20

This *seems* to be working! I tried all my previously crash-prone procedures and they all now work perfectly.

I tried both solutions, so I don’t know which did the trick, but for the past few weeks since upgrading I have had nothing but problems with CS4. I couldn’t reliably save, export or even place files in Illustrator without triggering a crash. None of the other “solutions” I’d found helped. Needless to say, I was totally frustrated. I’m glad I stumbled onto this. I’m definitely going to pass it along!

Thanks a kajillion!

Posted by Jay on October 13, 2009 at 3:12 PM (CDT)

21

I just upgraded to 10.6.1 AND tried the above suggestions - no problems so far. Cross your fingers.

23

24

Sorted! Option B did it for me—thank you SO much for posting this! I’ve found this info nowhere else, and believe me, I’ve searched.

The only problem now is, I can’t turn File Sharing back on again. Tried it, and tried to re-add the two folders that I share, and boom, crashing resumed. I share a lot of files on my home network, so this is a pain. But it’s still way better than crashing everything from Word to Bean to Apple’s own Address Book!

Let us hope that 10.6.2 has a bugfix.

Posted by Fletcher on October 16, 2009 at 4:25 AM (CDT)

25

YEAH!!! I’ve looked everywhere for a solution to this vexing issue. It ONLY happened after I upgraded to SL.

Solution #2 fixed this annoying problem for me on my Macbook. Now, on to my iMac.

I’m afraid to turn file sharing back on… But I guess I’ll have to try and see what happens.

Posted by Mark on October 17, 2009 at 9:23 AM (CDT)

26

YES!!!! Solution #2 did it! I just processed a dozen photos in PS without a glitch and I haven’t been able to do that since upgrading to Snow Leopard. I’ll test DW, LR and Bridge tomorrow. Thanks for the fix.

Posted by Henry on October 17, 2009 at 10:33 PM (CDT)

27

Cannot THANK YOU enough!! I have been suffering constant crashes on my MacPro since upgrading to Snow Leopard. No app was spared, even Preview crashed all the time. I performed both fixes just to be safe so I cannot say which one really did the job, but who cares? It worked!

28

Interestingly, the Adobe apps are the ONLY ones giving us problems, everything else is working like a charm. Aperture, Safari, Mail etc, all perfect.

Posted by Kim on October 19, 2009 at 12:37 AM (CDT)

29

It’s ironic that my earlier post to this list was lost in a system freeze at the time of submission.
I’ve tried both solutions, which helped somewhat, but did not solve the issues completely. It now seems very much a matter of chance - where previously my system was consistently slow and applications freezing all the time, it now has good and bad days. I cannot detect a clear pattern whether at home or at office, ISDN-cabled or airported, safe started or standard start-up.
[background: Running an Alu unibody MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz 4GB, imported my profile, settings & library from my G4 running 10.4 to this machine running 10.5 when purchased, upgraded after the Apple Snow Leopard dvd dropped into my mailbox - see post 162 in SL crashes for more detail if desired).

Posted by Peter Paul on October 19, 2009 at 12:29 PM (CDT)

30

Has anyone applied solutions A and B, and then reinstated File Sharing? Does the crashing recur? Or is the problem fixed and File Sharing can then be used?

Posted by John on October 20, 2009 at 12:04 AM (CDT)

31

Yup, applied both solutions A and B and crashing recurs. Main problem is Quick Look Helper crashing. Deleted all kinds of pref.files to no avail.

Posted by azawg on October 20, 2009 at 12:46 AM (CDT)

32

This mutha f——at apple really need to fix this.. They have been stiving their whole life to pull the profit Pcs have… And just when they ar starting to get popular.. This s—t happens… they release an OS less Stablet he Vista..

Im so dissapointed.. Thanks for the help on here.. but neither solution is full proof.. I use pretty much every adobe app in the master collection.. There are still pleanty of bugs.

Posted by Jimmy on October 20, 2009 at 4:06 PM (CDT)

33

Update on post #29 - After spending last evening time-machining as well as manually backing up, I did a erase of the HD and clean fresh install of Snow Leopard, followed by the SL update, then started adding applications. All punctuated by a precautionary dose of safe restarts. Result: Safari and Firefox prove unacceptably unstable and prone to freezing.
That’s it. I’m erasing again and installing 10.5 Leopard.

Posted by Peter Paul on October 20, 2009 at 5:56 PM (CDT)

34

Peter Paul: Which apps did you add, in total?

It might be useful to know. After my completely fresh start, my SL machine is now completely stable except for some modest non-crash pauses, and whatever’s up with the card reader.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on October 20, 2009 at 7:11 PM (CDT)

35

Not only have these tips fixed my issues (I’ve been just dealing with it for the past month!), but my Mac seems to be running generally faster. May be the placebo effect, but I’m happy either way!

Posted by Jayphen on October 21, 2009 at 1:04 AM (CDT)

36

Tried both solutions, which seemed to work for several days but no longer. Pages crashes when saving. No “report crash” message from Apple appears.

Posted by Joanne on October 21, 2009 at 9:31 AM (CDT)

37

Tried solution A, which didn’t work. Then did solution B, which seems to be working like a charm. So far, I’ve seen no problems since doing solution B, and the whole system seems peppier and more responsive. Hope it lasts!

Posted by imaginizer on October 21, 2009 at 11:14 AM (CDT)

38

Was having problems with wi-fi, controlling AirPort, etc.
Above solutions did not work, but a combination has me back online. There are still a few things wonky (cannot disable guest account completely and some other stuff that just doesn’t feel right), but here’s the solution that worked for me.

-In Network Preferences, deleted all locations. Last location cannot be deleted. Delete all services in left hand pane. Rename this last remaining location as ‘dead’ so you don’t use it by accident. Be sure to ‘apply’ the settings before continuing.

-Re-start in Safe Mode (holding down ‘shift’ during re-start until you see a black progress bar below the Apple logo on the startup screen).

-Check under Network Preferences to make sure all locations are still deleted and the remaining one is still named ‘dead’! If not, repeat the first step. On one of my machines, my old location names reappeared and had to be deleted again! If your settings remain blank, then continue on.

-Re-start the machine again (in regular mode).

-Go to Network Preferences and add a new location! Do not use the ‘dead’ location. You want to start completely fresh. Under your new location, you may now add services normally.

I hope this works for you! As I said, I still don’t feel my MacAir or my MacPro are running completely at 100%, but we’re back online and I am now able to configure a new base station and get everyone back online at work.

Some background:
Systems: MacAir, MacPro, Time Capsule (home), AirPort Express (work), generic wi-fi (work)
Symptoms: Old generic wi-fi (free-cycled) at work was getting wonky and slow. Other users with other systems were having problems also. After upgrade to Snow Leopard, neither Mac could connect at work, both could still connect to the Time Capsule at home and to other wi-fi around town.
Tried a friends Airport Express and a brand new one (which had been previously tested as working before this) and had numerous problems preventing setup. Random examples: couldn’t turn wi-fi on/off on Macs; couldn’t find Airport signal; full signal, but couldn’t connect to internet; one machine working with ethernet, the other only occasionally; settings changed in Preferences, only to have the old settings return. After using the method above, these problems now seem to be fixed. Was able to setup and configure the AirPort Express with a fast wi-fi connection to internet.

Posted by DJJackD on October 21, 2009 at 12:42 PM (CDT)

39

Neither Solution worked for me… until I turned off file sharing and removed all items from the list… The minute I did, everything was stable again… I could even turn file sharing back on again without issue. But the instant I added a folder to my list of shared (in my case, my desktop), the crashes ensued again. Luckily I only need sharing for me to get my large tivo files into windows so I can edit out commercials. It’ll be a hassle to turn it back on, but less of a hassle than the crashes.

Posted by Arr MiHardies on October 23, 2009 at 2:29 AM (CDT)

40

This has worked. I was in a constant state of crash by the time I finally found this page. Thanks VERY much for the ideas.

iMac wouldn’t even finish starting up before it would crash again. I couldn’t start up from the system disc (holding C, to reinstall or run Utilities) - it would crash. I eventually gave up and tried to reinstall Leopard - and of course it crashed before I could get the chance. I.e, totally useless computer.

FYI I’m not running any adobe applications.

So far, the safe boot and turning off file sharing have worked. I did both at once to be sure. A few oddities (screen suddenly blacked out a few times), but functionality resumed. Phew.

Now I’m terrified to do the 10.6.1 update.

Hands down the worst OSX upgrade ever. But boy am I glad it’s over.

Posted by J.Dog on October 23, 2009 at 9:07 AM (CDT)

41

Me too, tons of program crashes since installing Snow leopard update on my Mac mini. Called tech support and he had me do a safe boot and that seems to have helped. Found this page and also deleted the sharing folders as suggested. Seems to be working fine now! And I may be hallucinating, but the computer seems to be working faster!

Posted by joyce moore on October 24, 2009 at 3:16 PM (CDT)

42

Option “b” did the trick for me. But then I wonder how you go about using Shared Folder again without having the crashes.

Posted by d jenkins on October 24, 2009 at 10:57 PM (CDT)

43

Does anyone on this post use the production premium?
Because I have done these steps and photoshop, illustrator, flash and dreamweaver seem OK.. Well at least alot better..

but after effects premiere and encore still have the random crashing.

Posted by Jimmy on October 26, 2009 at 8:09 AM (CDT)

44

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Option B did the trick for me.. I had problems opening and saving in photoshop, illustrator and dreamweaver cs3, problem is solved for all.

Posted by talebanman on October 27, 2009 at 1:41 PM (CDT)

45

Thanks to all of you for posting your SL crash problems AND these suggested workarounds. I’ve been told more than once by Apple tech support reps that I am the ONLY one who is experiencing this.

Here’s an added tidbit to this saga, I didn’t want to risk any productivity down time, so I originally clean installed SL in a separate partition to preserve Leopard just in case. However the SL Time Machine backed up both SL and L and somehow corrupted all the permissions in Leopard. Now I’m untangling that mess too.

Posted by Kristi Smythe on November 2, 2009 at 6:11 PM (CST)

46

With these solutions no more crashings and problems on Export/Save Dialogs. I also repaired permissions in Safe Mode.
Thanks!!

Posted by LINUZ on November 4, 2009 at 6:26 AM (CST)

47

I tried Solution (b) and also used Disk Utility to repair permissions. No more crashes. Thank you SO much!

Posted by Sue Perl on November 5, 2009 at 11:56 AM (CST)

48

These solutions worked for me for awhile. But the crashes return after 2-3 days. Crashes are particularly bad if I leave my computer on continuously for a couple of days. I have AppleCare time left so called Apple. As many have said, this Apple tech had never heard of this problem. It is particularly bad, because some of hte early carashes were of applications, and a report was automatically sent to Apple. but not this type of crash and reboot. So they sent me an app called “Capture Data”. You are supposed to start this app, then reproduce the crash, and then send the data file (produced by this app) to the tech. Well, I can;t reproduce the crash, but it has been crashing regularly and I ahve been sending in the data files. If they ever tell me anything, I will post it here.

Posted by JohnPC on November 5, 2009 at 8:47 PM (CST)

49

Thank you, thank you, thank you…
I have a 2 yo 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro. I impressed myself by seemingly successfully upgrading to a 500 GB HD and 6 GB memory and Snow Leo just the other night. Amazed that i seemed to succeed in reinstalling all my apps, updates and info all in less than 24 hours. Then the crashing began. Similar to the many sordid tales in commented in the many other comments. resigned to erase and begin again and undecided whether to give Snow leo one more shot. I found these 2 fixes, did them both (B followed by A) and shazam, so far (and just 1 hour in) everything that crashed before (mostly MS Office apps and Firefox pdf downloads) are working perfectly. So far… knock on aluminum. Thanks for saving me hours of reinstall time. I’ll check back in in a few days if all is still well (or not)
Matthew

Posted by Matthew on November 6, 2009 at 10:14 PM (CST)

50

I’ve tried both options but everything else is still as screwed up as ever. The whole thing’s buggy, it starts of ok but slowly deteriorates, first the keyboard shorcuts stops working, then the layers freeze up and eventually it decides to quit. Afterwhich I would not be able to open any new files without it quitting! Are these two fixes really working for everyone else??

Posted by Leng on November 7, 2009 at 3:31 AM (CST)

51

It’s a miracle! Thanks alot. I will be spreading the word.

The first option worked for me after 2 weeks of pain. I called Adobe and was told to create a new user account and use CS4 from there. Very convenient as you could imagine - and Illus. still didn’t work. I was told “some-times the current user who loads the program won’t be able to use it because… wait for it… sometimes this just happens!” WTF.

I reinstalled and and trawlled the web. You have made my day… and now probably my clients.

Posted by Roni on November 8, 2009 at 1:31 AM (CST)

52

Solution B seems to have worked for me, thanks so much!

Posted by nonny on November 8, 2009 at 6:38 PM (CST)

53

Sincere thanks for what appears to be a fix for my maddening problem of Photoshop CS4 crashing in Snow Leopard.

Tried solution 1 to no avail then solution 2 did the trick. Thanks again for putting it out there. You have gained a follower!

Posted by gwfoto on November 9, 2009 at 2:36 PM (CST)

54

Tried both and neither has solved my issues. The system has crashed half a dozen times in the last 4 hours alone. BEYOND frustrated at this point.

Posted by Dionne on November 10, 2009 at 3:26 AM (CST)

55

has the update (10.6.2) changed anything for you guys? please tell us about your experience with LEOPARD 10.6.2

for me the second solution has been one, but as we share all our files at work (small office) using ‘file sharing’ i was hoping that apple would fix this bug with 10.6.2

cheers, plish

Posted by plish on November 10, 2009 at 9:33 PM (CST)

56

I had tried borth of the proposed solutions initially proposed for this r=thread. Both helped for a day or so, but the crashes returned with a vengence.

BUT SINCE UPDATING TO 10.6.2, I HAVE HAD NO CRASHES!!

Ot jas pm;u been 3 days or so, but iot ios a definite improvemwnt, and may have, indeed, solved the problem.

(It would be nice if some apple programmer would say what was causing the problem, and how they solved it.)

Posted by JohnPC on November 16, 2009 at 1:54 PM (CST)

57

10.6.2 solved the crashing problems on a MacPro but not on my MacBook Pro… very stressful…!

Worse… Running Photoshop CS2 on the MacPro, spend ages making sure the File Info is correct for syndication of my images and the agency I send to can’t read the File Info now.

Digging around, I suspect it might be bacause Snow Leopard is 64 bit and Photoshop CS2 is 32 bit… only a hunch.

Any ideas from you guys before I spend hours and hours and hours trying to figure it out myself?

Posted by Mike Day on November 18, 2009 at 2:30 PM (CST)

58

My Mac stop on buffering when I try to listen to any radio station.
Please help

Posted by Joe Peixoto on November 19, 2009 at 8:28 PM (CST)

59

I tried both suggestions. Crashes continue. I get about one a day, oddly about 1.5 hrs into my workday (though not precisely the same period after startup). It doesn’t matter what I’m doing—working in InDesign, emailing… Though it often happens while creating a pdf in InDesign.

Usually I’m not an early adopter. Just jumped on board because of my new MacPro. I regret it. But the system is faster, so I figure my interruptions might be counterbalanced by the speed when it’s working…

Posted by Gareth Lind on November 26, 2009 at 10:11 AM (CST)

60

I had the same problems of apps crashing the moment I opened an “open” or “save” dialogue. Up to yesterday I have tried all different kind of solutions, including the two mentioned here. To no avail.
Then I remembered that all accounts on the three computers I use have something in common: I symlinked a user’s Desktop folder to the user’s home diretory folder. In accounts without this symlink (such as newly created ones), the apps did not crash. The symlink in question was “ln -s /Users/HomeDirectory/ /Users/HomeDirectory/Desktop”. Once I deleted these symlinks and created a real Desktop folder, the app crashing stopped.

Posted by Kikjou Delatour on November 29, 2009 at 5:10 PM (CST)

61

After swimming through all these comments and suggestions, I tried the safe boot as recommended in your original post. I’m a little gunshy right now, but so far, my Adobe CS3 InDesign has not crashed in 2 days, as opposed to every 2 minutes in the past. Thank you for resolving this issue with Snow Leopard (I think it’s solved, anyway!).

Posted by Gizmette on November 30, 2009 at 11:20 AM (CST)

62

Hello all.

My “saves” seemt o be working fine, but I can’t get past the PDF issues I’m having. Every time I try to create a PDF form the new PDF menu in the Print window, a crash occurs. I can’t even Export a PDF in InDesign CS4 without the app crashing. I have updated Acrobat Pro to 9.2, removed the Adobe PDF Printer, etc. and still crash. Anyone have any ideas? I am lost without being to create PDF files!

Posted by Chris on December 3, 2009 at 9:20 AM (CST)

63

I tried both (but I leave sharing off).
flash start working properly (I’m on a fresh install and it didn’t work before).
OH MY GOD!
safe boot seems so stupid.

about repair permission, NEVER DO IT, it makes permission back to default, but a lot of advanced program need different permission setting to work properly, repair permission if you don’t really need to is just a suicide solution.

Posted by stefano solinas on December 5, 2009 at 10:45 PM (CST)

64

my crashes started before snow leopard, mostly safari crashing with messages suggesting the flash plugin was faulty. Then Logic 9 started having sync issues and made white noise! I installed SL in desperation but things are now worse. Each boot ends with a file from a backup disk open : keyedobjects.nib/selectedobjects.nib or something like that (sorry, I lost my note). Now having trouble installing new firewire audio hardware…any suggestions?????

Posted by Steve Frost on December 9, 2009 at 6:42 AM (CST)

65

Rooboot in safe mode WORKED !!

Thanks guys. I LOVE community.

Posted by Paul on December 14, 2009 at 5:08 PM (CST)

66

I don’t even go anywhere else for answers to my mac questions. Jeremy has had the fix for both of my most perplexing mac issues.

Way better than the genius bar. Simply the source for all things mac.

Posted by greg on December 23, 2009 at 9:49 PM (CST)

67

It appears that the problem is a poor implementation of file sharing in Snow Leopard. After installing Snow Leopard on my 24” iMac, I was unable to see any of my networked PCs or my NAS drive and had multiple daily application freezes to the point where I was considering abandoning the Mac.

After running Solution 2, I have had no freezes in two days and the Mac zips as it never has before - even before installing Snow Leopard, apps were slow in opening and I’d often see the pinwheel while opening an app or when saving files. Now things just zip right along.

The remaining problem is getting file sharing working again. i still can’t see the PCs from my Mac.

Thanks to the folks who contributed to this solution. I only hope that Apple is listening and can come up with a fix.

Joel

Posted by Joel on December 25, 2009 at 12:19 PM (CST)

68

I LOVE YOU, FINALLY A FIX TO THE CRAPPY PROBLEMS!!!

ADOBE HAS BEEN JUST IGNORING US AND WE HAVE WON, WE HAVE FIXED IT FOR OURSELVES

THIS IS AWESOME

THANK YOU SO MUCH

Posted by John Pooley on January 4, 2010 at 4:14 PM (CST)

69

Adobe isn’t ignoring you, but Adobe (or any other developer) can’t do a bloody thing to fix all of Apple’s bugs in Snow Leopard.

Look at all those crash reports—see the common theme? They all crash in Apple code. If you look closely you can also see Apple denying the problems, then fixing them in their dot releases.

Posted by Pissed Mac User on January 8, 2010 at 10:28 PM (CST)

70

I too would like to say thank you for this information. Although I didn’t believe it would help me, solution 1 worked in my situation.
Just in case anyone else has this problem, I thought I would describe my setup and problem.
I received a new 15” MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz this week. I live in Australia (probably irrelevant) and it came with Snow Leopard installed. I ran software update which took me to OSX 10.6.2
The very first thing I did was to install the CS4 Master Collection and then Final Cut Studio 2. I then ran software update a couple of times until all these pieces were updated.
That is the only software I had installed. I then tried to launch After Effects but it wouldn’t open. The icon bounced a couple of times in the tray and then stopped bouncing without launching. No messages, just no response. I rebooted a few times, tried it many times but it varied between bouncing a couple of times to completely ignoring my clicks.
I searched everywhere I usually do for some information about this but nothing seemed to confirm that anyone else might have a similar issue.
Then I found your page, which although not specifically about my problem, was the closest I could find to something vaguely related to it.
I thought it was worth trying anything so gave your safe boot option a go. Lo and behold, after doing a safe boot, followed by a normal boot, upon trying to open After Effects, the icon bounced like a happy beach ball until the app opened.
I am very happy and very grateful.
Thank you very much.
Kind Regards
Brett

Posted by Brett Williams on January 15, 2010 at 9:28 PM (CST)

71

YES! YES! YES! Safe starting cured not only my inability to open a Word doc. without crashing EVERY TIME!, but also cured a font problem on my MBP with SL.

I can’t thank you enough!

Posted by PAUL on January 16, 2010 at 6:17 PM (CST)

72

Unlike everyone else - No No No!

I had a couple of hangs after upgrading to Snow Leopard last week and stumbled across this thread. Unfortunately the reboot to safe mode, test a couple things and then do a normal reboot resulted in my MBP getting much worse. As in I can only run Safari and iTunes but absolutely nothing else and I mean nothing else - no terminal, no system preferences, nothing. So I went back into safe mode and tried method #2, no change. Back in safe and tried running disk utility to fix permissions, this finished but then hung and I had to power it off to reboot.

What I get is the classic application icon bouncing but nothing happening scenario. Interestingly if I look at the recent items the app I try is listed as a recent app and there is a corresponding recent .crash file for each app I try that doesn’t work. Of course that is a mirage as there is really no .crash file.

Fortunately I have a Mac Mini to help me in troubleshooting this. Stay tuned….

Posted by Al Moulder on January 19, 2010 at 4:06 PM (CST)

73

The first solution worked for me. Yah!!! Thanks a heap.

Posted by Rob on January 21, 2010 at 9:20 PM (CST)

74

As with no 72, no, no no.
Recently bought an iMac 2.8GHz Core i7 8Gb RAM so OS 10.6.2 came pre-installed. My bread and butter is QuarkXpress so I have not extensively tested other software but everything seems to be working fine except for Quark. I am in serious danger of compromising my business because I have one job on which I am falling more and more behind deadline because Quark crashes continually and so I have not got a days work done in two weeks now. Continual calls to tech support, trying the options on this and other forums. No joy anywhere.

Posted by Brendan Lyons on January 27, 2010 at 4:59 AM (CST)

75

Booting into safe mode seems to solve my problems, at least for a few minutes… Sooner or later, though, it all comes back again. The dock gets stuck, random apps stop responding, I can’t save as… While I do have better luck dragging an image to a folder and renaming it, even that got messed up recently. I could save the image, but every time I tried to rename it, the renaming did not work. Snow Leopard was heaven for the first couple of months, now it really sucks. (27” i5 iMac)

Posted by Doug B on February 18, 2010 at 10:41 AM (CST)

76

try rebuilding the spotlight index too? you can use the terminal command
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/‘your drive name here’
then you need to enter your admin password.

Also try deleting your printers and reinstalling the drivers.

The FINDER works completely differently now, no longer looking at the resource fork for the ‘creator’ and ‘application’ codes. this means for example, that all .jpg files will now ONLY open with one default application, which you can easily set with the option-right click on the file.

The way you drag and drop or select items has also changed and causes me to constantly ‘miss’ the files I want to actually move or select. i had to change the click sensitivity delay and then play around with the ‘hot spots’ in the finder to see where you can drag or not…

I also turned off the small application that allowed me to see all the invisible files, which start with ‘.’, since the .ds files were being updated so often and quickly that none of my sorted lists would stay long enough for me to select a file.. dumb. mdutil is running too often.

Posted by srm consulting in SF Bay Area on March 18, 2010 at 6:07 PM (CDT)

77

Neither solution works to fix problem with PSCS3 crashing on “save” or “save as” in OSX 10.6.2. This problem has persisted for many months now, and it is frustrating that there is no attention apparently being given to it by either Adobe or Apple.

Everything else on my installation of 10.6.2 works without crashing.

Posted by Shirley on March 25, 2010 at 1:52 PM (CDT)

78

yap! restart in save mode save my day too.

Posted by Rog on April 18, 2010 at 11:42 AM (CDT)

79

I installed 10.6 several months ago. It started out great, and then got slower and slower and slower - and recently I was getting the spinning beach ball all the time. Just trying to switch tabs in Firefox would usually pop up the beach ball for 1-5 seconds before reacting. All apps would boot up followed by a good 20 seconds of spinning beach ball before they became responsive. Using my computer was a nightmare.

Then!!! I tried solution (a) above 2 days ago. It has worked wonders!!! My computer is responsive again, running more like I’d expect it to. My wife was having the same issue, so I did this on her computer as well, and it made her computer much faster. The spinning beach balls hardly ever appear anymore.

Posted by Greg on May 19, 2010 at 4:31 AM (CDT)

80

Solution “b”! Thank you!

Posted by michelle on May 20, 2010 at 12:26 PM (CDT)

81

One of the accounts on my Imac would not login after the upgrade, but all the other ones worked without a problem for the most part.
After trying the safe boot I was surprised to find that i could login to the account again.
HOWEVER
i soon learned that your computer cannot play sound in safe mode so I restarted my Imac without holding any buttons… and it keeps on trying to start up in safe Boot. But now for some weird reason It crashes whenever it safe boots! This stuff actually made one tiny little problem A WHOLE LOT WORSE!
I even tryed unplugging the whole keyboard and that didn’t work. I can boot up the system through my snow leopard isk but that doesn’t work now. I have some work on that machine that i didn’t back because i thought, “Hey its just another start up keypress thingy right?” WRONG! its FOREVER! THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW!!!
You have screwed me over FatalFallacy and Mr. Pi, and now i am stuck on my Crappy little netbook! Now I have to tell my parents that I broke the 1300$ computer just by holding Shift when i turned it on.
Am I angry? Yes! BUT, i do realize that it is more important for me to fix this. I just don’t want to be stuck on a PC again. (who knows WHAT would happen when you hold shift on those things!)
So if there is anyway to get OUT of safeboot I would be Glad to hear it.

83

Thanks everyone. I was getting quite pissed that my mac wasn’t responding like it did when i purchased it. i decided to do both fixes just for safe measures. Its only been a couple of hours but everything appears to be all good. I will let you all know if the problem appears again.

Posted by cperiodj on June 2, 2010 at 11:20 PM (CDT)

84

Since installing Snow Leopard my macbook (2.16 Ghz) has been generating a lot of heat thus the fan was always working hard, using up a lot of power, and making a lot of noise. The mac activity monitor indicated that SophosManagementAgent was tasking the processor by 99 - 100% of capacity. Uninstalling Sophos Antivirus on my macbook just simply address the issue.

Posted by henry g on June 6, 2010 at 8:07 PM (CDT)

85

Hi all and thanks for the tips. All 4 of my Leopard and Snow Leopard run intel macs would crash on right-click inside non-native applications, most notably in Word and Adobe CS3. I have had this ever since I upgraded to Leopard.

Having read the original article, I did a shift-restart and the problem disappeared. However, on normal restart, the problem came back. I also rebuilt permissions using the disk utility buy to no avail. Has this happened to anyone else? Does anyone happen to know a cure? Thanks.

Posted by sabin on June 22, 2010 at 11:55 AM (CDT)

86

Legend! 2nd one worked for me.

Posted by CJaay on July 4, 2010 at 6:55 AM (CDT)

87

Solution #2 works like a charm… might take far less time than solution number 1. However, I like the idea of having permissions reset from a general good practices/ maintenance point of view. Maybe one Sunday over coffee… Ah refresh the permissions on my Santa Rosa.

Posted by Omar on July 30, 2010 at 7:22 PM (CDT)

88

Thanks!! The safe mode / reboot solution did the trick. So simple, so easy. Glad I found it before trying more complicated time-consuming suggestions.

89

90

Wow, I just use win 7 and my machine “Just works”.

Posted by Leo on November 2, 2010 at 2:00 AM (CDT)

91

MacBook Pro 2.4 Ghz. Updated to SL from Leopard about 3 weeks ago.
No problems until suddenly could not boot. Stopped at grey circle with diagonal line through it. Could safe boot reliably but had no sound. Tried A & B above, still no joy. Checked version was on 10.6, System Update said 10.6.5 was available installed it where it asked me to install (and reboot) got Spinning Beachball = Finder unresponsive. Force Quit the finder and update proceeded fine. On reboot still have the grey circle with diagonal line through it. bugger, back to the drawing board.

Posted by B Hanson on November 24, 2010 at 4:58 PM (CST)

92

My wife just got a new MacBook Pro and she was seeing frequent crashes in Safari and Apple Mail. We had migrated all of her data over from her iMac running Tiger from a time machine backup. We tried both of these suggestions and neither worked.

After 3 hours on the phone with Apple Care, the thing that finally fixed the problem was logging in as root and renaming the fonts directory for her login to fonts.old. We were told that the migration plan from Tiger to Snow Leopard forgets to remove incompatible fonts during the migration process. Things seem to be OK now.

Posted by Paul on December 29, 2010 at 2:43 PM (CST)

93

Fabulous. I think. After trying the reboot fix. (I had already checked Permissions and removed sharing before reading this). When I restarted in Safe mode I got an instant crash. I then restarted again and have tried all of the things that Snow Leopard hated most - games, email, scrolling fast, leaving on Sleep mode over night. One week later - no crashes. I am “cautiously optimistic”. Thank you.

95

It all started with Firefox, newest release, then I started using Safari and the random crashes still occur.

I’ve found this post, tried both, and my problem persists…

Any feedback from Apple?

Posted by Felipe on June 15, 2011 at 9:52 AM (CDT)

96

My MAC Snow Leopard 10.6 system shut down suddenly and will not power on.

Posted by Lamar on December 18, 2011 at 1:35 AM (CST)

97

Neither worked for me, so I went to the Genius Bar at y local Apple store. Here’s what we did:

(user)—> Library—-> Caches
Empty entire contents of Caches folder, restart and then empty trash.
(best if your app is not a Startup item).
Combining with a delete of your entire Preferences folder (not just for Photoshop) might be a good idea too.

Worked like a dream.

Posted by luckychucky on February 5, 2012 at 8:09 PM (CST)

98

I have had this problem for three years now, just found these suggestions after all of the crazy other things I have tried. Been happily using Leopard since 2009, but i successfully upgraded spare hard drives to both Lion and mountain lion, i just didn’t like the new lack of arrows and other “updates” to an otherwise nifty os.
Hopefully, these suggestions are the final remedies so I can upgrade to mac versions of CS6.

Posted by mark ortho on November 26, 2012 at 1:50 PM (CST)

99

Tried both solution. Deleted all sharings and
rebooted. No more HD crashes !!! Thanks :-)